Dave and Buster’s

I’ve truly sunk to a new low. My division at work was invited to a party here to celebrate being a division–two weeks after our division was re-orged out of existence. Talk about a comedown. Here were a bunch of people I was no longer connected with in a bizarre place at a party thrown by people I no longer reported to. The nice part, I suppose, is that everything was still free. Granted, I had so much work (the party was in the early afternoon), that I only had time to gobble a few semi-decent wings in a side room that had all the aesthetic of a phone booth. I was actually about to take off, depressed and stressed out of my skull, before a former co-worker (and former NJ cop) told me that I needed to come shoot some shit with her. I kinda mistook her statement as “shoot the shit” and started to take off, cuz who needed to talk about the unhappiness that Dave and Buster’s was compounding with its oddball darkness, antiseptic surroundings and mid-afternoon emptiness. Turns out she literally wanted to play this standup shooter game with the freebie cards we got from our generous employer. So I stood there and shot and reloaded and shot and reloaded and died and reloaded… And I gotta say that after a half hour of blowing away baddies, I felt pretty damn good. So despite being lured into this pit of despair by the prospect of free wings and beer and kissing up to whomever was going to be my new boss’ boss, I walked away with a new found respect for gratuitous video game violence and aggression aversion therapy. [MF]